Inuit

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT INUIT - PAGE 2

Consumption By Kevin Patterson Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 384 pages, $25 When 16-year-old Victoria was returned to her Rankin Inlet home in the Canadian subarctic, having spent several years away from her family in a sanitarium hundreds of miles to the south, her body was no longer weak from the tubercular infection in her lungs. And her mind, now the inquisitive mind of an adolescent more fluent in English than in her native Inuktitut, was no longer the repository of the knowledge and ancient traditions of her Inuit family.

By Article by John Husar, The Tribune`s outdoor columnist | November 2, 1986

"The unemployment rate here is tremendous, yet I have a terrible time finding women willing to clean rooms or wait on tables," says Doug Lamb, manager of Baker Lake's solitary hotel. "They`re wonderful people, and they work hard, for a month. Then they get some money and want to do something else." Most prefer the freedom to pursue the old ways, mainly to hunt, even though the vital Inuit hunting industry has ebbed with settlement. Year after year the concentration of hunters has forced the good hunting farther and farther from the towns, until now it is difficult to hunt profitably at all. In 1978 the bottom fell out of the entire Arctic coastal hunting industry with the collapse of world sealskin prices, eliminating fully half of Inuit income.

What is the name given to the northern third of the Canadian province of Quebec? Answer: Nunavik (not to be confused with the territory of Nunavut). It covers an area of more than 190,000 square miles, and 90 percent of the population are native Inuit.

"Kayavak" is the name of Shedd Aquarium's nearly 4-month-old beluga whale, the institution announced Saturday in selecting the winner of a contest. Matthew Phillips, a 5th grader at St. Mary Star of the Sea Grammar School, Chicago, proposed Kayavak, an Inuit word referring to a singing game that creates soft echoes, aquarium officials said. "The whale's high-pitched squeals and bell-like tones" resemble an echo, Matthew, 10, explained in an essay. Out of 1,000 entries, Matthew won a yearlong family membership to the Shedd and a chance to have his picture taken with a beluga.

The Inuit of Canada's Northwest Territories are hunters in the old tradition. They believe the animals were placed on earth to serve them and that they must comply by hunting. Entire families instantly leave jobs and classrooms for long forays on the ice when seals, polar bears, walrus and caribou are handy. These animal products are used for food and traditional clothing, equipment and art objects, supporting a hard-pressed native industry. They`ll share the meat with other families, but sell the skins to augment income.

Inuit whalers plying the Arctic inlets off the Beaufort Sea for their annual beluga hunt are worried about falling prey themselves-to conservationists. Anti-whaling groups are setting the stage for an international battle next year to curb native hunting of belugas in Canada, Greenland, the United States and the Soviet Union. Every summer white belugas swim into the Mackenzie River estuary north of Inuvik while native whalers camp along the shores in July and August to pursue them.

Can you believe there's a language spoken by a snow-afflicted people that has quite a few words for snow? The language is English. A quick search of a thesaurus found 10 words that mean "crystallized water that falls from the sky" in Chicago each winter: blizzard, dusting, flurry, powder, slush, snow, snowfall, snowflakes, snowstorm, whiteout. All that stuff about the Inuit having 400 words for snow is a bunch of bunk. "They have somewhere between 4 and 10 basic words for snow," said Bob Mucci, an anthropology professor at Indiana University Northwest in Gary.

- In a Jan. 29 story that was on Page One in most editions, the name of one of the Shedd Aquarium's two beluga whales was misspelled. The correct spelling is Puiji, an Inuit name meaning "those who show their noses," not Twuiji as reported. The other whale's name, Immiayuk, correctly spelled in the story, is Inuit for "echo." - An article in the Jan. 23 Food Guide about buying safe fish erroneously stated that all orange roughy sold in this country has been frozen. Although much of the orange roughy, a fish that comes mostly from New Zealand and Australian waters, does come into the United States frozen, a small amount is imported chilled and sold fresh.

"Miki," an Inuit word that means "little," is the name chosen for a baby that will be anything but when he grows up at Shedd Aquarium. More than 9,000 people cast votes in the last few weeks to name Shedd's male beluga whale calf born Aug. 16, choosing from among five possible Inuit names. The winning name was announced Friday morning. The calf already is pretty big -- 6 feet in length and weighing an estimated 220 pounds. By his 1st birthday, he could weigh up to 600 pounds, and as an adult he could tip the scales at more than 1 ton. "I'm sure we all know someone of large stature whose nickname is 'Tiny,' so it will be fun to watch Miki grow to his adult size and weight," said Ken Ramirez, Shedd's vice president in charge of animal training.

The new female polar bear at the Lincoln Park Zoo has been named Anana, the Inuit word for beautiful. The winning name was the brainstorm of Dan Lavery, a Cook County Sheriff's Police Department employee from Elgin, who took the grand prize in the contest to name the 18-month-old bear. Hundreds of names were submitted for the bear, which was transferred along with her male sibling Lee to Lincoln Park from a New York zoo in early March. "It's a very appropriate name for the bear because polar bears are native to Alaska ... as are the Inuit people," spokeswoman Kelly McGrath said.